Factsheet: Ryan Mauro

IMPACT: Ryan Mauro is an analyst at the anti-Muslim organization, the Clarion Project. Mauro regularly makes anti-Muslim accusations and unfounded claims on Fox News programs and during trainings for law enforcement officials. He is a proponent of policies that criminalize Muslims and Muslim communities.

Ryan Mauro is National Security Analyst and Shillman Fellow at the Clarion Project, which he joined in 2012. According to his public professional profile, Mauro has been a contributor on Fox News since 2010, and an adjunct professor teaching “counterterrorism issues” since 2011 with Liberty University Online.

From 2009 to 2014, Mauro was a contributor to Front Page Magazine, published the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an anti-Muslim organization. Mauro has written articles sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, an anti-Muslim think tank founded by Daniel Pipes, whom the Center for American Progress (CAP)’s Fear Inc. report describes as a “misinformation expert” in the “Islamophobia Network.” Mauro was also a frequent contributor to the Center for Security Policy’s Secure Freedom Radio and podcast from 2011 to 2016.

Mauro is listed as a team member of the Christian Action Network (CAN), a “public advocacy and education organization” that promotes homophobic and Islamophobic claims and viewpoints. CAN, which describes itself as “based on biblical principles, values, traditions and American ideals,” has produced documentaries on what it describes as the “encroachment in American society” of “Islamic Sharia law.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described Mauro’s views as conspiracy theories, including the claim that terrorists have taken over parts of the U.S., making them “no-go zones” for non-Muslims. In 2010, Mauro wrote in Frontpage Magazine in an article that has since been removed from the website that, “Islamist groups are, as we speak, hard at work creating Muslim states-within-states in the U.S.” The “no-go zone” myth has been debunked here, here and here.

Mauro heads the Fuqra Files, an online initiative of the Clarion Project that went live in December 2016. The initiative advances conspiratorial claims about The Muslims of America (TMOA) and predominantly rural African-American Muslim communities.

Mauro has previously collaborated with ACT for America, an anti-Muslim grassroots network with chapters around the country. In 2015, Mauro was one of the speakers at ACT for America’s National Conference and Legislative Briefing, which was keynoted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In a 2014 appearance on Fox News, Mauro disclosed that he coordinated with local ACT for America activists in Texas during his investigation into what he claims about a “terrorist enclave” in Texas.

On April 26, 2016, Mauro presented at the New York Tactical Officers Association Conference, a three-day training conference that, as reported in Alternet, was advertised by direct mailing to “every SWAT and crisis negotiation team in the United States” and every “state, local and federal law enforcement and corrections agency in the Northeast.” Mauro lectured on the topics of the “Global Threat of Islamic Extremism (ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Iran)” and the “Threat of Islamic Extremism in America/New York State.”

In August 2016, Mauro also presented in San Diego, California, at the California Association of Tactical Officers symposium, which was titled: “What Law Enforcement Needs to Know About Islamic Terrorism” and was open only to full-time law enforcement.

In July 2016, Mauro wrote on Breitbart News that then-Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Kaine “embrac[es] Islamists,” appointed “a Hamas supporter to a state immigration commission,” and “honor[ed] a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect.”

In a March 2014 Clarion Project article re-published on the Center for Security Policy website, Mauro argued that the “Islamist Muslim Brotherhood” has overwhelming “influence at the highest ranks of the Republican party’s apparatus.” Mauro also claimed that “the ultimate goal” of “Islamist ideology” is to “replace the American Constitution with Islamic sharia law.”

Mauro has made statements that advocate the criminalization and surveillance of Muslims. According to reporting in April 2016 by Huffington Post journalist Christopher Matthias, “Mauro’s continued embrace of the terror accusation” against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil liberties organization in the US, “highlights his role in a multimillion-dollar network of hate groups, think tanks, politicians and talking heads who regularly spread fear and misinformation about Islam.”

Last updated April 3, 2018